Web of the City (2 page)

Except, the book was titled
Rumble.

Nonetheless, it was an experience that comes only once in a writer’s life, the first book, and I was the tallest walkin’ Private in the Army that week.

Maybe I should have taken sides with old Ernie, dumping this book in the Pacific as he dumped that first novel in the Atlantic; but I cannot forget the hot August afternoon in Kentucky during which I realized my life’s dream and became, for the first time, an
author.

And even if
Web of the City
isn’t
War and Peace,
you just can’t kill something you’ve loved as much as I love this book.

So read on and, with a little compassion on your part, you’ll be kind to the memory of the punk kid who wrote it.

HARLAN ELLISON

• rusty santoro
  
• the cougars
  

The city lay cool and dim beneath a vaulting sky of high-scudding gray clouds. A gray shroud that covered the corpses of buildings, stiff in brick-and-steel rigor mortis, pale in their eternity of sooty death.

The heat of the afternoon had slowly passed away, the trembling waves of warmth disappearing like wraiths to be replaced by mugginess and unrest; the sweat had gone back into the pores, the cats back into the alleys, the wineheads back into the bars, the amateurs back to their pads.

It was evening, and evening was free time, and free time was the time to go! Rusty was abroad in the night.

His name was Rusty, but it wasn’t really Rusty, and he had cut the umbilicus that bound him to the gang. A half hour before he had faced the gang and snarled, “I told ya a couple months ago I was through, that I was split with the Cougars, an’ ya been buggin’ me ever since to come back. Now you better know what I’m sayin’—’specially you, Candle—that I’m done.

“That’s my answer. Now I’m splittin’ and I don’t want no trouble.”

That had been the speech, and those had been the emotions, and that was what had started it, what had set the spider to weaving. The spider was a city, gray and observant and jealous once in a while, though deep inside it didn’t really care at all. But the black widow cannot stop weaving, and the city cannot stop weaving. Alike in temperament, they feast on their spawn.

It was good to get away from them. Rusty felt the sweat that had come to live on his spine trickle down like a small bug. He had made his peace with them, and he was free of the gang. That was it. He had it knocked now. He’d built a big sin, but it was a broken bit now. The gang was there, and he was here.

He was no longer Prez of the Cougars, and the road was starting to open up. He’d be able to walk past the fuzz on the corner, and not have the bluecoat stare at him like he was hot or something. He was out and gliding.

The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet. Like it was down, man. A down down bit. What was up?

He came around the corner, and they were waiting.

“Nobody bugs out on the Cougars,” was all one of them said. It was so dark, the streetlight broken, that he could not see the kid’s face, but it was light enough to see the reflection of moonlight on the tire chain in the kid’s hand. Then they jumped him.

He took a step to run. A fist crashed into the side of his head. He felt the brains within him scramble and jumble, and then he went down. The tire chain took him in the small of the back with a crack that numbed both his legs, sent lancets of liquid fire up to his neck.

He tried to cover, to dummy, folding in like a foetus with head and gut and groin protected, but there were hundreds of them, and they used their feet.

Metal-toed barracks boots, reinforced motorcycle boots, sod-brogans; they stomped him again and again. His ribs were numbed in a second, his back was a plain of welts and blood. One of them got through his protectively covering arms and caught him on the right cheekbone.

“Holy Jesus, Mary, god save me…” he murmured softly through bloody lips and they continued working on him.

It only went on forever.

Then the sound of a cop’s whistle broke the silence that had been host to only the sounds of stomping and his grunts of pain. The whistle came from far away beyond the veil of foggy pain that swirled in on him, and one last resounding kick took him in the crotch. He screamed like an animal. Then he heard them running away. The whistling grew louder.

“G-got to, to make it…” he bubbled, trying to rise. He fell back and lay there panting. The pain was so big, man, so big. He crawled to the gutter and slipped over, trying to raise himself on the fire hydrant. He got to his feet and saw that the world had been sawed in half across the skull-top. “Ma—Make it away…” was his plea to the night.

He stumbled away, into the alley, and down its stinking length to a hideaway behind the rubbish bins and cardboard boxes. He fell into a sitting position, his eyes closed, and waited.

The cop hit the scene on the street, and looked around. Deadly all-pervading silence. Gone. They were gone, and he had missed again. Damned juvies!

The cop checked out. Rusty Santoro lay there, eyes closed, and hurt.

Then he opened his eyes, for someone was watching him.

In one of the bricked-up doorways in the alley, slumped down with a ketchup bottle full of Sweet Lucy, lay his father. Eyes red and puffed, his face a mask of interest and stupor intermingled, Mr. Santoro stared brightly at his son. Rusty could tell, the old man had seen it all and had not moved to help.

Rusty lay there with the pain like a torch in him, barely drawing breath, seeing his father for the first time that week. He lay there gasping and wetting his ripped, bloody lips with a dry tongue-tip.

“They beat’a hell outta ya, didn’t they?” Mr. Santoro cackled.

Rusty shut his eyes and let the darkness that marched in behind the irises take him. He swirled down and down, with pain his partner, and knew this was a typical night. It was the same.

Always the same.

You can’t get free. Once stained, always stained. The seeds of dirt are sown deeply. And are harvested forever.

Darkness outside, while his father laughed and fell asleep also.

• rusty santoro
  
• candle
  
• pancoast
  

There was no doubt about it: they were getting ready to stomp him again. They were going to wait for him in an alley and slice his gut out. That was the way the Cougars did it to a member who left the club. That was the way of it, and no escaping.

Rusty Santoro knew they were going to get him, if it took forever. They had asked, “You comin’ back?” and he had stalled, trying to find a way out. But now there was no way out. They had jumped him the night before, and the pain was still big in him. Rusty choked as the chisel bit into the leg of wood, sprayed sawdust across his face and T-shirt. He puffed air between his thin lips, continued working, and continued to ignore the boy who stood behind him.

The boy who had come to kill him, surely. Candle; their Prez, their assassin.

The wood shop had quieted down. No one else moved, and their tools were silent.

He had wakened in the alley this morning, and hurried right to school. He couldn’t cut out, or the boom would lower on him… after all, he was in Pancoast’s custody, and any infraction of the rules would stone him good. He ignored Candle, behind him.

The alley had been cold, and his back had been stiff and he had ached terribly, but as the hours had passed, the pain had simmered down to merely a constant throbbing. Three teeth were broken, but they were in the back, and when he had washed his face, only a group of blue and ugly welts were left on his face. Broken flesh and shattered capillaries studded his right cheekbone, but it would pass. His lips were raw.

His back was in worse shape. But he knew he would live. He had to—because the Cougars wanted him dead.

The school shop was empty of voices. Only the constant machine hum of lathes that had been ignored, left running, filled the shop with sound. Yet somehow the room was silent.

The boy behind Rusty took a short half-step closer, shoved his shoulder hard. Rusty was thrown off-balance, and the chisel bit too deep into the chair leg between the lathe points. The design was ruined. The chisel snapped away, and Rusty spun, anger flaming his face. He stared hard at the other boy, changed his grip on the wood chisel. Now he held it underhand—knife-style.

The other boy didn’t move.

“What’s a’matter, spick? Y’don’t wanna talk to your old buddy Candle no more?” His thick, square face drew up in a wild grimace.

Rusty Santoro’s face tightened. His thin line of mouth jerked with the effort to keep words from spewing out. He had known the Cougars would try to get to him today, but he hadn’t figured on it during school hours.

Over him, somehow—tense as he was, knowing a stand was here and he couldn’t run without being chick-chick—Rusty felt the brick-and-steel bulk of Pulaski High School.

You just can’t run away from them, he thought.

The boy, Candle, had come into the basement wood shop a minute before. He had told the shop teacher, Mr. Pancoast, that he was wanted in the Principal’s office. Mr. Pancoast had left the shop untended—oh, Kammy Josephs was monitor, but hell, that didn’t cut any ice with
anyone
—and Candle had moved in fast. First the little nudge. Then the shove that could not be ignored. The dirty names. Now they were face-to-face, Rusty with the sharp wood chisel, and Candle with a blade. Someplace. Somewhere. It wasn’t in sight, but Candle had a switch on him. That boy wouldn’t leave home without being heeled.

Rusty looked across into Candle’s eyes. His own gray ones were level and wide. “You call me spick, craphead?”

Candle’s square jaw moved idly, as though he were chewing gum, when he was not chewing gum. “Ain’t that what you are, man? Ain’t you a Puerto? You look like a spick…”

Rusty didn’t wait for the sentence to linger in the air. He lunged quickly, slashing upward with the chisel. The weapon zipped close to Candle, and the boy sucked in his belly, leaped backward. Then the switchblade was in his square, shortfingered hand.

The blade was there, and it filled the room for Rusty. It was all live and lightning, everything that was, and the end to everything else. Rusty Santoro watched—as though what was about to happen was moving through heavy syrup, slow, terribly slow—and saw Candle’s hairy arm come up, the knife clutched tightly between white fingers. He heard the
snick!
of the opening blade, even as the other’s thumb pressed the button.

Then there was a green plastic shank, and a strip of light that was honed steel.

The shop was washed by bands of lazy sunlight, slanting through the barred window; and in those bands of light, with sawdust motes rising and turning slowly, slowly, Rusty saw the blade of the switch gleam. Saw it turn in Candle’s hand, saw the way his flesh cleaved to it with more than need; this was part of Candle. Part of his thought and part of his life. His hand had been formed to end in a knife. Anything else would have been wrong, all wrong.

“Don’t you ever call me that again, man. Just don’t you call me no spick again!”

Candle dropped his shoulders slightly. He automatically assumed the stance of the street-fighter. No spick bastard was going to buck him. There was more to this than just a wood chisel. Nobody, but nobody, leaves the gang.

“Well, ain’t you gettin’ big these days. One minute you’re too good for the Cougars, and the next you’re particular who calls ya what.” His green eyes narrowed, and the knife moved in aimless, circling little movements, as though it were a snake, all too anxious to strike.

“I don’t dig you, spick man…”

And he came in fast.

The knife came out and up and around in one movement that was all lightning and swiftness. Rusty slipped sidewise, lost his footing, and went down, his shoulder striking hard against the base of the lathe. He saw Candle strut back and get ready to pounce. Then there was all that knife in his vision, and he knew he was going to get it at last. Not later, not sometime never, but here, gutted and cut, right here on the floor, and there was nothing he could do about it. He saw Moms and Dolores.

Candle rose high, and his arm drew back, and then his arm was dragged back of his head by someone else. Rusty looked up and everything was out of focus, and his shoulder hurt, but a man with dull red hair had Candle around the throat, had the knife-hand bent back double. Candle screamed high and loud, over the whine of the machines, and the man twisted the arm an inch more.

The blade clattered to the floor.

The man kicked it out of sight under a drill press, into sawdust debris. Then the man had Candle by the front of his dirty T-shirt, was leaning in close, and saying, “You get the hell out of here, or I turn you over to the Principal and tell him you lied to get me out of my shop while you attacked a pupil with a switch. With your record around here, Shaster, you couldn’t stand it. Now beat it!” He shoved Candle Shaster away from him, sent him spinning into the door.

Candle threw it open, spat on the floor, and was gone in a moment.

Rusty still found himself unable to focus in properly, but Mr. Pancoast was lifting him to his feet, and yelling to the other boys, “Okay, let’s get back to work.”

The rising clatter of shop work filled his universe, and then he was out in the basement hall, in the cool depths of the school. “Sit down,” Pancoast directed him, pushing him gently toward the stairs.

Rusty sat down heavily. Now he not only felt the incessant throbbing of his shoulder, but for the first time felt the full force of the pain where, he now realized, he had struck his head. It throbbed mercilessly.

Pancoast slid down next to the boy. He was a short man, with hair just a few shades darker than orange. His face was tired, but there was something alive in his eyes that gave the lie to his features. He had been dealing with high-school boys so long, he had difficulty with adults, so geared were his thoughts to the adolescent mind.